I’ve seen Quicksilver mentioned several times at LifeHacker (for example, this video presentation by Quicksilver’s maker), so I decided to give it a go.

What does QuickSilver do?

Quicksilver started off as an application launcher, but it’s taken the concept much further. Basically it allows you to use your Mac without having to search around for things with your mouse. You can do quick jobs like ‘look up this word in dictionary’ or ‘email this file to someone in my contacts’ with a couple of shortcuts. Watch the video presentation by Quicksilver’s maker for a more in-depth introduction.

Dowanloading and installing Quicksilver

Quicksilver can be downloaded from softonic.com. You drag it to your Applications folder, and on first run it will install some common components it thinks you need. There you may also change the hotkey combination from the default (CTRL-space) to whatever you want (I use CMD-space – this would normally be Spotlight, but I have switched it off in the System Preferences as I don’t use it that much.

Basic usage: Quicksilver as an application launcher

Initially I used Quicksilver as an application launcher. This is very simple: you click your hotkey combination (CMD-space is good because you can hit it with one finger), start typing a few letters from the name, and when the app appears in the list, you click return. For example, to switch to Firefox you can type f-i-r or f-f-o-x. Or you can hit ‘f’ and use the up-down keys to find the item you want from the list. Quicksilver will get to learn what apps you use the most.

Very quickly you’ll get to the point where you can just hit the sequence CMD-space, initial of app, return and you are switching between apps much faster than by pressing CMD-TAB, scanning the stripe for the icon you need, and tabbing to it. Additionally, Quicksilver allows you to find documents and folders as well as applications – for examplce, CMD-space, L-i-b, return will open the ~/Library folder in the Finder.

Using Quicksilver’s tabs

When you select an app or location and hit return, what happens is that Quicksilver picks the most likely action associated with that app, which is “Open”. This is only one of the many possible actions – if you want to get to the complete list all you need to do is hit tab. Quicksilver will show you a second box next to the item you have just selected. This contains a list you navigate the same way, i.e. either using the up-down keys, or typing selected letters from the item you seek. For example, to pause iTunes without switching to it, you can hit CMD-space, i, tab, p-a-u, return. Or to quit Mail in the background, CMD-space, m, tab, q, return.

Some commands allow for a third tab, which works exactly the same. So for example if you edit images and sometimes you want to open them in Preview to look at them, and sometimes in Photoshop: CMD-space, S-m-e-l-t-t-e-r-s-f-r-m-i-m-g (Quiksilver will quickly close in on a file called “Some letters from image”), tab, O-w (Quicksilver will select Open with…), tab, then Ph for Photoshop and Pr for Preview.

This looks quite involved when I put it into writing, but it is essentially very quick. Plus, the more you use Quickilver the more it learns your habits, and the fewer keystrokes it takes to do the most common tasks.

Passing text to different applications with Quicksilver

The tabs Quicksilver creates can not only contain applications, files, folders, and actions, but bits of text too. To switch a tab to text mode, just hit period. This is another area where Quicksilver becomes really useful.

Say you are doing some research on the internet. You have Firefox open, and you find some info you want to make a note of. You select some text on the page, hit CMD-space, . (QS switches to text mode), CMD-V (to paste the text in), tab, c-r (brings up ‘Create file’), return. Then you are presented with a “Save as…” dialog, which lets you create a text file somewhere. From then on, you can keep on adding new pieces of text to that file by copying, doing CMD-space, ., CMD- V, tab, a-p-p (Append to file), tab, (few letters from filename you just created), return
Again, this is something that looks confusing in writing but it’s very quick to do in practice, and it gets faster the more you do it.

Becoming adept at Quicksilver

The next step is to look at what other plugins are available, start looking at the possible actions list to see if there’s anything in there that could be of use, looking up the documentation, and so on. You do all that in the Preferences. To get to them, either you can hit your hotkey combination and then click on the small triangle at the top right of the overlay, which brings up the Preferences dialog. Or you can tab to Quicksilver the traditional way, and select the Prefences from th menu.

Advanced Quicksilver Tips

I am collecting some advanced tips, and when I have enough of them I will put them into a separate post.